Every so often, a new form of technology comes out that wows us and boggles our minds. I’m talking jaw-dropping, how-did-they-do-that, I-gotta-have-it awesomeness. Twitter is not one of those technologies. But it is pretty cool.
The perfect marriage of text messaging and short attention spans that is as Twitter came into being in about the middle part of 2006. A few short years later, it sits graciously among the top ten most visited websites in the world. During that time, it has accomplished a grocery list of achievements. Look at the things Twitter has done. It consistently breaks news from around the world with both professional and eyewitness accounts. It has organized protests and given a voice to people living in oppressed nations. It has saved lives.
I don’t exactly remember when I became aware of the platform but do I remember first entertaining the notion of signing up with Twitter back in 2009 when Ashton Kutcher, one of the big-name early adopters of the phenomenon, and CNN were vying to become the first Twitter account to have a million followers. I’ve always liked Ashton Kutcher. I like him as much for the person that he is and the projects that he’s passionate about as much as I like him as a media figure. So I wanted to help him reach that goal. Plus, it was for a great cause. If his @aplusk Twitter account reached 1,00,000 followers before CNN’s @cnnbrk account, he pledged to donate 10,000 bed nets that keep mosquitoes out to people at risk of catching malaria in Africa. Of course, being the generous philanthropist that he is, Ashton later announced that he would donate nets whether he won or lost.
As history would show, Ashton went on to win the race. He became the first Twitter account to acquire one million followers. It was a victory not only for him and for Twitter but for those in need of mosquito nets in Africa – inspired by the historic competition, fellow media luminaries Ryan Seacrest and Oprah Winfrey also donated thousands of nets. CNN even made a contribution.
Up until that point, I, like many others around the world, had heard of Twitter but really hadn’t given signing up much thought. I viewed it as an unnecessary social network for people who thought they were more important than they really were. It’s original tagline, “What are you doing?”, threw a lot of people off. The running joke was that Twitter was for broadcasting what you were having for lunch. I soon saw differently.
It wasn’t until after my best friend Aleitra Holmes actually created a Twitter page for me that I decided to go ahead and take the plunge. A few weeks later, I begrudgingly took ownership of the account and was instantly hooked. People were tweeting asinine things, to be sure, but it was, for the most part, entertaining. People were tweeting funny messages, linking to hilarious pictures, and talking about things that interest me. It was like a never-ending line of custom-made entertainment. I soon found, like YouTube, there exists an entire culture where people are famous only on Twitter and have followers who hang on to and retweet their every word.
For the first three days after assuming ownership of my account, I was checking Twitter constantly. I couldn’t wait to find out what the people I was following had to say. And I loved the idea of being able to pump my own thoughts and ideas out into the world. Any random thought that I had suddenly didn’t have to disappear into the depths of my subconscious mind. It suddenly had a place it could go where likeminded people could respond to it! If they didn’t, that was fine, too, because that wasn’t the point.
What I liked about Twitter was that it provided a free exchange of ideas and information. It allows me to partake in a global conversation while keeping up with what is going on in the world right now. With Twitter, I can learn about an issue hours before it makes its way to the evening news. It also makes celebrities seem more normal. Almost every famous person from Academy Award winners down to college athletes seems to have a Twitter account nowadays. “It’s a chance for people to know the real me,” the iconic Sean 'Diddy' Combs once said of the site.
Of course, not all celebrities send their own tweets. The occupation of being a celebrity’s personal tweet-writer has seemed to spring up almost overnight. By the way, if any celebrities are reading this and have a need for a personal tweeter, email me – I’m very affordable.
Of course, nothing is perfect. Like everything else in life, Twitter has its problems. There’s the much-criticized downtime, particularly in crunch time. For example, on the day Michael Jackson died, the world was scrambling to find out what was going on. Twitter crashed that day. There’s also the pesky issue of public tweets appearing on third-party websites without permission of the author. And as difficult as it may be to police, Twitter has entirely way too many spam accounts.
But still, I like it. The pros outweigh the cons. Twitter is like a loyal dog who I can tell my problems to. But unlike any real life dog that we know of, Twitter has the ability to talk back. Twitter allows me to meet and make friends with people I have a predetermined connection with, especially during big events like award shows or sports championships. As the saying goes, Facebook is for people you go to school with and Twitter is for the people you wish you went to school with. Having an account allows me to have my opinions heard. I can rant and rave all I want and at the end of the day, I know that I’m not alone. As Ashton Kutcher once remarked about the site, “I found it astonishing that one person can actually have as big of a voice online as what an entire media company can on Twitter”. Its new byline “What’s happening?” greater reflects its assumed identity as the go-to place to find out what’s going on in the world. It’s a question the site shouldn’t even have to ask. Twitter is what’s happening. Right now.
I can be found pondering the intricacies of life at @21stCenturyCeo.
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